Le Singe Peintre – Stefan à Wengen
In 1740, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin painted a small picture* of a monkey - here one of the lemur species - well dressed and wearing a bicorne hat on his head, sitting in front of the canvas with a brush and palette and the figure behind him on the right tried to paint. The work thus shows the artist as a monkey who, instead of creating, only has the ability to depict. Or to put it more wickedly: he shows the artist as a monkey who is able to adapt and who wants to acquiesce to criticism. It is also rumored that with this picture Chardin expresses his mute pictorial criticism of less important colleagues who, however, received a free royal pension at the Louvre before him.
Even the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, who achieved a high reputation through his encyclopedic work on natural history, describes the characteristic of the monkey as an animal with human-like traits and with a habit of constantly imitating humans, as a kind of caricature of them. The bestiaries of the Middle Ages, however, associate the monkey with the image of the devil and evil, thereby emphasizing its malicious and superficial character.
In spite of all this – or perhaps precisely for these reasons – the monkey has repeatedly found its motif in painting, both in the old masters and in the modern age up to the present day. In the so-called Les SingeriesFrom the 17th to the 19th century, the monkey even took on entirely human roles, such as those of visitors to inns and their drinking bouts, those of world travelers or those of people puffing their pipes in a smoking salon, as can be seen in painters such as Ferdinand van Kessel (1648 – 1696), David Teniers (1610-1690) or Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873). However, in terms of its context, the most consistent is Chardin, who shows the monkey in his predilection for mimesis as a kind of mindless imitator, who sometimes paints well and sometimes badly, just as chance dictates.
As with my Ghost Portraits (2005) and the Original Gurus(2014 – 2017) Strictly speaking, and recognizable through collages, I first produce fakes, which then become originals again through the implementation in painting with their guaranteed claim to truth. In the Le Singe Peintre series, however, I use portrait paintings by artists such as Frans Hals, Rembrandt, van Eyck or Bruyn, in which I swap the heads and hands for those of a primate. It is a game similar to what my compatriot Rémy Zaugg played on a conceptually abstract level with his Le Singe Peintre series (1981), in that he did not vary the image but rather the idea of the Singe Peintre and in it as a director, ape, actor and author rolled into one.
Have I instructed a monkey, perhaps one with Stendhal's syndrome , to paint a monkey like him as a Van Eyck painting? Are the pictures possibly an ancestral gallery of later relatives of the lemur Chardins? Or is it myself, apparently playing a game and slipping into the role of a human being in order to imitate the old masters "unconsciously" and with pleasure? Is it the role of the primate who is nevertheless very aware of his unconscious? Or are my monkey portraits even a mirror held up as a broken, ironic gesture towards criticism and the art world, similar to Chardin's anger and discontent towards certain colleagues and influencers in the cultural sector? Prima primates!